


"Smile. You'll Look Prettier If You Do."

by ragingdevi



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: AU Joker, AU origin, Oneshot, inspired by a tweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 05:32:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12029202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ragingdevi/pseuds/ragingdevi
Summary: Inspired by this tweet:https://twitter.com/Hello_Tailor/status/902884077593874432"how about a Joker origin story where she's a woman who got told "You'd be prettier if you smiled" one too many times & went off the deep end"Which, I worked at a grocery store for 11 years and I could completely understand why someone might become a supervillain.So of course I had to write something.





	"Smile. You'll Look Prettier If You Do."

"Do you want to know how I got these scars?" she asked.

A question that was all too familiar to him, though had been always been asked by another. "I don't think I want to know." He could have just left, one grappling hook at the adjacent building and he could have zipped right out of there.

"Oh, come on. You might hear something you like." "Why would I like it?" He always had time for a tale.

"It might be a story you enjoy."

"How could I possibly enjoy it?" He didn't like to make it known, but this was the most important part of his self-appointed job.

"It might give you a clue to the real me. I could just tell you the whole story." She smiled, the corners of her mouth coming apart in wounds that never healed correctly, never sewn up by the needle of a surgeon. The corners lengthened and spread, exposing all of her molars in a creepy, teeth-filled grin. A grin made all the more disturbing by her white face makeup, messy red lipsticked lips, and eyelids smothered in black makeup. "Don't you want to hear it?"

He smirked to himself, and turned his head so she wouldn't see it. "I suppose you could tell me. Since you seem to want to tell someone so badly."

"Hmm," she grinned to herself. "Well... since you want to know so badly." He sighed.

"Ever work in retail?"

He turned towards her and raised an eyebrow.

"Is that your eyebrow raising? I really can't tell."

"I-- yes."

"I'm going to guess that's a 'no' then."

He didn't say anything.

"Anyway. If you had ever had the..." she began to pace as she began her story, "severe displeasure of working in retail, you'd know how horrible it is."

"Where did you work?"

"It doesn't matter. Whether you deal in food, clothing, or fucking sex toys, customers are always the same."

"I'm going to guess you're not going to say 'always right'."

Her eyes widened in shock, his statement took her by such surprise. She belly laughed. "AHHH HAHA!! No one told me you were funny!!"

He smirked to himself as he waited for her laughter to subside.

"Ohhhaha... fuck. Ohh... that was good." She smiled.

But a smile that, to him, didn't look creepy. It was a genuine smile.

"No, the customer is not always right, the customer is always an asshole," she began again as she resumed her pacing. "I think most people these days don't 'abuse the waiter' because they're too afraid of their food getting spat in or worse, they go to a store an abuse the staff. Now, maybe not all of them are doing it on purpose - there has to be some segment of the population who is just entirely oblivious to how annoying they are to other people - but I think most of them act how they act purposely because they're hateful people who want to abuse others in order to feel better about themselves."

"And what do you call what you do?"

She stopped and smiled, this time a snarky smile that threatened to pull her mouth open to where it had been cut years ago. "Honey, what I do is all according to plan." She winked.

He raised an eyebrow again as she resumed her pacing, slowing moving as she spoke.

"Working in retail, especially in a country with a weakened union presence and weakening civil liberties for workers, is not fun. You sign away huge chunks of your time to a corporate conglomerate that does NOT care about you, you cover for other workers all the time, you somehow always end up working weekends especially if you didn't want to in the first place, and you essentially have few rights while your wearing that shirt or name tag or stupid hat with a hot dog on it. All of a sudden, you can't defend yourself when someone attacks you, verbally or physically, because it might reflect poorly on the company. Never mind how that person made you feel or if they physically hurt you, if you retaliate you could get fired. If you react you could get fired. I had a coworker who once told a man 'no' when he asked her to take a cruise with him, and she got fired. Punching people in the face reflects poorly on the company, yelling at someone reflects poorly on the company, telling a man no in an even, flat, not-at-all-angry tone reflects poorly on the company, and all of those will get you fired."

"Do you know that from experience?"

Teeth. Again. As she smiled her eyes narrowed, a sickly grin like a cat who knocked a priceless vase off a table, knew the value of the object, and was absolutely pleased with themselves.

"Maybe. Once."

"Really? Or are you just saying that to sound cool?"

"Heh," she laughed once through her teeth as she stood still. "Honey, I don't need to 'sound cool' I'm already hella fucking cool. But I did punch a customer once."

He viewed her with no expression.

"Knocked a tooth loose and everything." She smiled again.

He looked at her with the same non-expression.

She turned on her heel and resumed pacing. "You're a man so this is nothing you've ever experienced-- unless the Riddler has picked up a new annoying habit that I'm unaware of. Men, especially older men, like to tell women to smile. All the time. We could already be smiling and they would tell us to smile. We could be bleeding to death and they would tell us to smile. We could already be dead and they would tell us to smile. I've had older men tell me to smile so many times that I'm pretty sure that one could hit me with his own car, get out, ask me why I'm not smiling, and then tell me to smile. They just... really want young women to smile."

She stopped, expecting some reaction, a response, anything, but received nothing, and continued.

"There's something about that, and it's not just being told to smile, it's being told to smile by different older men every day. It's the fact that, they don't care why you might seem unhappy to their eyes, they just care that your apparent unhappiness is ruining their day. And I say 'apparent' because any time one of those assholes told me to smile, I wasn't angry, I wasn't sad, I wasn't even vaguely perturbed, I was simply existing."

She checked for a reaction again. Nothing.

"Existing in a place where men who felt they had some control over me took it upon themselves to tell me... 'Smile. You'll look prettier if you do.'"

"So..." he finally said. "How did you get those scars?"

She turned and smiled again. "I'm glad you asked. One of these men - I can't remember his name anymore, says a lot about him - came into the store where I worked every day for... I don't know how long it was, seven years? I held multiple jobs at a time and my brain is foggy now as to how long I was at each for. Regardless, he came in every single weekday, at 9:07 am on the dot. I don't remember if he actually had some kind of job, but he was there at 9:07am, every single weekday. Rain or shine, sleet or snow, if a volcano exploded he probably still would have come in every weekday, I don't think he missed a single one. The weekends were my only reprieve because I knew there was no way he was coming in."

She looked at him, no reaction, she continued.

"Every single weekday for about seven years, he came in, and every. Single. Day." Her eyes met his with a severity he didn't expect. "'Smile. You'll look prettier if you do.'"

She swung her leg in what he thought was a child-like manner as she turned and continued pacing.

"Every single weekday. Every. Single. Day." She said as each word in the latter part of her statement coincided with her footsteps as her heavy boots hit the cement rooftop of the building he had found her on. "Every single day he told me that. But only on a weekday. I never heard it on a weekend, only on a weekday did I know I would have a brief moment of wanting to kill myself so I didn't have to hear it anymore. Of wanting to quit but not being able to because I desperately needed the money. My weekends were fine though, they were safe... until one day - a Sunday I believe," she took on a far away look as she regurgitated a well-worn phrase momentarily, "'the lord's day' - my safety, the personal safety of my own sanity, was invaded. I saw him as he walked in, too. I saw him and I knew that I would have to hear those words. That the sudden, intense, suicidal feeling would suddenly come back, unbidden. Or no, maybe it wasn't 'unbidden' I didn't want to feel like I wanted to kill myself, but the need to escape was so great that it was like... the hypersensitive response in plants."

His first reaction in a while, a single eyebrow raised.

"Sorry, I was talking to Ivy earlier. When a plant is attacked by a disease some genes that evolved as part of the plant's defense to combat that disease cause the infected areas of the plant to suddenly die off. That man and his... words... I could feel that response firing away in my neurons, but instead of instantly killing cells, I instantly wanted to kill myself because at least I didn't have to hear him anymore."

She waited for a response but nothing came.

"'Don't you think that's a little hyperbolic?'" she imitated him gruffly. "Not really, no. You have some asshole tell you to smile for seven years and we'll see how you react."

"I... I can see how that might get under your skin."

She smiled. "That wasn't the only thing," she hooked a finger into the widened corner of her mouth, the edges of what used to be her cheek opening easily, and lolled her tongue out of her mouth and rolled her eyes up into her head. A strange reference to the blade that cut her cheeks open.

"He did that to you?"

She stopped. "Lord no." She thought to herself for a moment and smiled, "I... did this to him."

"What?"

"Evey single day." She repeated.

"Every. Single. Day." She got closer.

"EVERY. SINGLE. DAY." She bellowed. "Do you know what that's like? Sure it was only five days out of the week, but they all start to blend into each other at some point. They all become one big, undefinable mush of 'Smile. You'll look prettier if you do. Smile. You'll look prettier if you do. SMILE. YOU’LL LOOK PRETTIER IF YOU DO. It's like being an animal that was captured in the wild and forced to be in a cemented over cage in a shitty zoo. Nothing to exercise the brain, only grunt work to do, feeling like your life means nothing, and this... garbage excuse for a human being comes in and tells you to smile - because apparently you, who are decor and not a human being - are making his experience in the store worse because you aren't just a beaming ray of sunshine."

She paused for a moment and he felt he knew where this was going.  
"Imagine you're that wild animal, and people come to look at you during the zoo's open hours and they bang on the window. They bang on that window from then the zoo opens until they get kicked out so it can close. Can you imagine what that would do to you? Can you possibly imagine how that might start to make you feel like you're losing it? How it just grinds your self worth and your will to live down into nothingness? And then, one day, some douche bag sneaks into the zoo when it's closed and bangs on that fucking glass. Don't you think that would be the moment when you just... snap?"

He looked at her plainly.

"And then leave your cage and follow that douche bag and and get your revenge?"

"...What did you do?"

She hooked a finger in either corner of her mouth and smiled, her eyes wild. She let her arms drop to her side and took on a much more serious expression.

"Well, first I asked him why he wasn't smiling," she jokingly explained as a small child might if they were caught doing something they shouldn't have been. "He wanted me to smile all the time but he never walked around with a smile plastered on his face, why should I? That's just not fair." The last words accompanied a few pokes right into the chest of his suit and a pout voice. "So I asked him if he would like to smile with me." She smiled again, purely and sweetly despite the makeup and cheeks that never healed.

"What did he say," he asked flatly.

She laughed quietly. "He thought I wanted to have sex with him."

"And... you didn't."

"I didn't. I just wanted to know that, if he wanted me to smile so bad, if he would like to smile with me."

"And that's when...?"

"A knife. My hands. His face. Then my face..." She smiled dreamily for a moment. "Then his neck."

He was somewhat disgusted, he always was when one of his rogue's gallery wanted to tell him about their exploits. But he didn't think was so much an exploit as something done to salvage any iota of sanity she had left at the time. From her point of view at least. And he wasn't even sure she retained that sanity in the end.

"Then I dumped his body in the river. I think he sank."

She turned to leave but he felt no inclination to stop her. She turned back to him for a moment and bared her opened, toothy smile for him to see.

"And I haven't stopped smiling since."


End file.
